As Support Grows for Ban on Killer Robots, Viral ‘Slaughterbots’ Video Warns of Threat to Humans

AI’s “potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defence, but allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom”. This short film is more than just speculation; it shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies that we already have.

In December the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to repeal already compromised regulations that are in place to maintain a semblance of “net neutrality”. Its chairman, Ajit Pai, and the corporations that are internet service providers want to sweep away these rules, just like the banking sector got rid of financial regulations so it could inflate our economies into giant ponzi schemes

Censorship!! Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find

“Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ – even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they’ve found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT,” Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement.

A documentary short from Brave New Films compiles heartbreaking statements from those 16 women, which taken together are “incredibly powerful, and damning.” “We owe it to these women, and to all women, to hold President Trump to account.”

Why weren’t there any witnesses to Kennedy’s murder? – There were, dozens of them – here is one they killed

You’ve probably heard that many eye witnesses to the Kennedy assassination had very short lives after the assassination.Here’s the story of one of them: a plainclothes detective with the Dallas Police Department.

At the home of Clint Murchison, the Texas oil tycoon. Murchison owned J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson, and State of Texas law enforcement and stood to lose a fortune if Kennedy changed the oil depletion allowance and faced the very real possibility of jail time should then-Vice President Johnson be indicted, which gave the appearance of being a certainty.

Climate change is creating a disaster on Australia’s doorstep, with environmental degradation and the demand for sustainable sources of food undermining stability in some countries, especially “fragile states”,the demand for water and food will rise, with the world’s oceans and forests under intense pressure. It notes climate change and pressure on the environment could contribute to conflict and irregular migration, impacting specifically on Australia’s economic interests.

“This isn’t only about Trump’s antipathy toward non-white immigrants. We may also be witnessing a particularly brutal form of climate change adaptation” and how wealthy nations may handle climate refugees in the years to come.

State Premier Jay Weatherill said testing of the massive lithium ion battery would begin within days, ahead of the December 1 deadline Musk set for himself when he signed off on the project earlier this year. Musk’s Tesla Powerpack is connected to a wind farm operated by French energy firm Neoen and is expected to hold enough power for thousands of homes during periods of excess demand that could result in blackouts.

Australia has been named as one of eight countries expected to lead a massive boom in energy storage uptake that will see the global market double six times over between 2016 and 2030, to an installed total of 125GW/305 gigawatt-hours in 2030. With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will direct the energy transformation.

A steep decline in wholesale electricity prices forecast between 2018 and 2022 is due to the entry of 6,000MW of renewable capacity which has already been incentivised by the existing renewable energy target.

In August 2016, Peter Michael Ketcham, a former employee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), began looking into the reports his agency had released years earlier on the collapse of the World Trade Center. What he found shook him to the core.

If you look closely at the details of a 2014 contract to bring Chinese-manufactured locomotives to South Africa, you can tell that something more than transportation was going on. On the surface, the contract referred to a big, seemingly conventional deal in which China South Rail, a state-owned Chinese manufacturer, would deliver locomotives to South Africa’s state-owned transport infrastructure firm, Transnet. China South Rail’s contract for 359 locomotives was worth a whopping US$1.5 billion. But this was no straight deal.

Rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood coastal cities by the end of this century. The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years — much too quickly for humanity to adapt. “With marine ice cliff instability, sea-level rise for the next century is potentially much larger than we thought it might be five or 10 years ago,”

According to a report by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization, nearly 200 million people are victims of modern slavery or child labor around the globe. In 2016, 40 million men, women and children were victims of modern slavery. Nearly one in ten children are victims.

Muhammd Bin-Salman’s purge in Saudi Arabia is the prelude to something bigger.: a carefully planned prelude to a sectarian war waged in ‘Arab nationalist’ guise against the growing power of ‘Shia’ Iran and its surrogates in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq with American and Israeli backing. The old Saudi Arabia is no more. Wahhabism is breathing its last, has been all but buried and is in the process of becoming history. A new Saudi state is being born. A new American-led alliance is taking shape in the region.

The Iranians are more or less in control of Iraq. Iran is simply not a good country to attack, especially with a lack of a clear vision of what “victory” constitutes. So you ought to be crazy to attack Iran. The problem is, of course, that the Saudis and the Israelis are crazy, they have proved that many times over. So our best hopes is that they might be just “crazy”, but not “that crazy”. Not much of a hope, but that’s the best we got.

US backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, and blame it on Assad govt

The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown. A new report, that contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence, showed a scheme ‘approved by Washington’.

Taiwanese men exposed to higher levels of air pollution – much of it the type caused by coal and petrol engines – tended to have poorer quality sperm. The researchers examined “the swimmers” of close to 6500 men who participated in a standard medical examination program between 2001 and 2014.

CSIRO-developed metal membrane, which allows the high-purity hydrogen, needed for hydrogen-powered cars, to be separated from ammonia. The technology, now being trialled on an industrial scale in Australia, was “the missing link” that allowed hydrogen to be transported and used as an energy source.

Enough battery storage may be available “behind the meter,” households and businesses, to meet the storage needs. The required investment in energy security and reliability over the next five-10 years will be minimal (see graphs), even if wind and solar deployment moves far beyond levels contemplated by the Energy Security Board. The contrast with the modelling – and the attempts by Coalition parties at state and federal level to dismiss high levels of renewable energy as “reckless” – could not be more pronounced.

Climate change could make half of the world uninhabitable for humans as a rise in temperature makes it too hot to survive. Global warming will not stop after 2100, the point where most previous projections have ended. Temperatures may rise by up to 12C making many countries into deserts.